This story is a partnership between Inside Climate News and CBS News:
HOUSTON — When the news crew showed up outside a waste-handling business that’s failed three fire safety inspections and has yet to gain state approval to store plastic, workers quickly closed a gate displaying a “no trespassing” sign.
Behind the gate, deliveries of hundreds of thousands of pounds of plastic waste from residents’ homes have piled up over the last year and a half. Satellite and drone images reveal bags, bottles and even a cooler spread about, some of the plastic heaped high in bales next to strewn cardboard and tall stacks of wooden pallets.
The expanding open-air pile at Wright Waste Management, on the edge of an office park 20 miles northwest of downtown Houston, awaits what the city of Houston and corporate partners including ExxonMobil call a new frontier in recycling—and critics describe as a sham.
The Houston Recycling Collaboration was formed as a response to low recycling rates in the city, a global problem. Hardly any of the plastic products meant to be used once and tossed can be recycled mechanically—the shredding, melting and remolding used for collection programs across the country.
The Houston effort adds a new option alongside the city’s curbside pickup: Partners say people can bring any plastic waste to drop-off locations—even styrofoam, bubble wrap and bags—and if it can’t be mechanically recycled, it will be superheated and chemically processed into new plastic, fuels or other products.
Exxon and the petrochemical industry call this “advanced” or “chemical” recycling and heavily promote it as a solution to runaway plastic waste, even as environmental advocates warn that some of these processes pump out highly toxic air pollution, contribute to global warming and shouldn’t qualify as recycling at all.
But the Houston effort illustrates a different problem: Twenty months into collection, ongoing tracking by environmental groups indicates the household plastic waste people have dropped off still isn’t getting chemically recycled.
A massive plastics sorting plant planned by one member of the collaboration, Cyclyx International, isn’t on track to open until the middle of next year. And the plastic mounting at Wright in the meantime likely will build up even faster because city officials and their partners expanded their collection program in April from one original drop-off center to eight.
An investigation by Inside Climate News and CBS News that uncovered Wright’s failed fire safety inspections and missing fire permits also unearthed a fracture in the public-private collaboration.
One of the city’s industry partners, FCC Environmental Services, which operates a large sorting facility for the city’s curbside recycling program, has opted out of the drop-off collection. In a July 2023 letter, the company raised concerns about the safety of storing plastic waste at a facility that lacks required permits.
“As a member of the [Houston Recycling Collaboration], FCC does not want its reputation and image involved in such irregular and risky practices,” Inigo Sanz, chief executive officer of FCC at the time, wrote in the letter to partners without mentioning the Wright site by name. FCC also complained about the focus on storing waste for future chemical recycling while missing opportunities to recycle some of the plastic mechanically.
Public records requests by Inside Climate News and CBS News also found that the fire marshal’s office for Harris County, Texas, inspected the Wright site three times from July 2023 through April and failed it on each occasion. The inspection reports noted that the company was operating without some of its required fire operational permits, including those for handling “hazardous materials” and “miscellaneous combustible storage.”
A fire inspector visiting the site on April 30 observed “significantly more product” around the facility than during the previous inspection. There were “no fire lanes or means of controlling a fire,” the inspector wrote, and the public right of way was blocked by a new 15-foot tall, 100-foot wide and 500-foot long wall of wooden pallets stacked outside the fence line.
Plastic recycling facilities are notorious for catching fire and sending toxic smoke billowing into the air. All it takes is a trigger: an unextinguished cigarette, sparking from electronic or mechanical equipment, arson, oily rags spontaneously combusting. That’s why conditions at the Wright site worry local environmental advocates, county fire inspectors and at least one independent fire investigator.
“Five acres of paper and plastic piled up with little or no fire suppression: What could go wrong?” said Richard Meier, a private fire investigator in Florida who worked 24 years as a mechanical engineer in manufacturing, including in plastics companies. He reviewed the Harris County fire inspection reports and Google Earth images of the site from earlier this year at the request of Inside Climate News and CBS News.
“You have piles and piles and piles of all this fuel,” Meier said. “Plastic is a refined version of petroleum, and paper is chewed-up wood.”
The fire risk only grows with intense summer heat, for which Houston is known.
“When you are talking about igniting a fuel, it is about adding heat to that fuel. If the fuel is already warm, it takes much less added heat to start an ignition,” Meier said.
The company’s owner declined to comment.
When shown a drone video of the Wright site taken in July, informed of the three failing fire marshal’s inspections and told that Wright’s application to store plastic had not yet been approved by state environmental regulators, the city’s top solid waste official responded with surprise.
“That contradicts some of the information we have in our records,” said Mark Wilfalk. “The last report we had was they are A-OK.”
Wilfalk later said he had been relying on his department’s review of the Wright site and not that of the county fire marshal.